Is there anything worse than waiting around in the house all day for a delivery? Of course, it’s not too bad during an Ashes cricket summer, but those only come around once every four years.
So yeah, let’s just say there’s nothing worse than waiting around all day for a delivery, only for it to show up a five-to-five in the pm, right? Thankfully, for owners of the Nest Hello doorbell, that particular peeve is about to become a thing of the past.
Google is adding a significant string to the bow of its Nest Hello doorbell camera; alerting owners when a package has been delivered to their front doors. Hallelujah! That way they can pop back home and rescue it or kindly ask a neighbour to do them a solid and grab it before some thieving scumbag does.
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The new package detection feature is rolling out to all Nest Hello users with an active Nest Aware premium subscription, thanks to a little machine learning nouse.
In a post on the Google blog, Rosie Buchanan, who works on machine learning within the smart home division, explained how her team taught the cameras to identify the packages through positive reinforcement.
The post explains: “Rosie and her team teach machines through supervised learning. To help Nest cameras identify packages, they use data that they know contains the “right answers,” which in this case are photos of packages.
“They then input these data sets to the computer so that it can create an algorithmic model based on the images they provided. This is called a training job, and it requires hundreds of thousands of images.”
In time, Rosie says, the computer learned to identify a delivered package without human assistance. The addition delivers one of the most requested features from Nest Hello users tired of waiting around all day for their deliveries.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.